In a word, compared to 2009, it was crazy: over nineteen-thousand vistors payed more than thirty thousand visits to the site, and with an average of 2.13 pages per visit they generated well over sixty-five-thousand pageviews. That’s nearly two gigabytes of data.

March last year, I was quite pleased with the increase of visitors to the site in the run-up to the release of mr. Loaf’s new album, Hang Cool Teddy Bear. As I expected, once the album was released, the traffic increased. April 20 was the busiest so far, with 153 visits.

From early May to late August, traffic slowly went down. Then I did two things: I added a page for a promotional single for the Belgian production of Tanz der Vampire, and I played around a bit with Google’s webmaster tools. The results were quite absurd:

The traffic went through the roof. For about three months, from the release of the promo single, through the start of Dans der Vampieren in Antwerp and the subsequent release of the cast album until a couple of weeks after it closed, there hasn’t been a day that there were less than a hundred visitors. On the busiest day there were 243 visitors.

The bounce rate shot down. As far as I understand it, bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors that come to your site, and leave after seeing just one page. A bounce rate of 40% is supposed to be quite normal, and anything under 20% is very hard to reach. For most of the year, the bounce rate was just above 60%. Then it went down to less than a single percent, and it stayed there. Franky, I still don’t believe it’s possible, but statistics don’t lie, do they?

In case you wondered what I did with the webmaster tools—not much. I didn’t do much more than generating and uploading a sitemap. And while that should benefit the indexing of the site, I don’t see how that explains the dramatic surge in visitors and abnormal drop in the bounce rate.

79.10% of the visitors came in through a search engine. 95% of those vistors used Google.

10.29% of the visitors came in through one of 228 referring sites. Facebook is with 27% the largest in this area, followed by three forums related to the subject of the site. (Disclosure: I visit those forums, and I am not above shameless plugging.)

The remaining 10.60% came in directly.

Geographical distribution: There were vistors from 118 countries. Belgium leads the top 5—dankuwel—with nearly a quarter of all visitors, followed by Germany (18.03%), the United States (13.36%), the United Kingdom (11.73%), and The Netherlands (7.47%).